Know your banker. That kind of changed in the era of electronic banking. I didn’t need to actually go into the bank did I? We have drive thru banking/ATMs everywhere. Just let me stay in my car, drive thru and carry on with my day — I’m extremely busy, dontcha know?

The Inconvenience of Convenience

It all worked well. Until ATM deposits started having a hold on the funds until they could actually be verified.

This bothered me to no end — the electronic transactions that are supposed to travel at the speed of electrons were actually slowing things down. It meant that I got access to money later rather than sooner.

So I talked to my bank’s manager about it one day, and she explained to me how it worked. And now, every time I have a cheque, I take in to see the real, live people that work at the bank. Because they know who I am. They can see my banking history. They can ask me if I’ve had cheques from that particular client before or if they are a new account. They can look me in the eyes and we can TALK.

That’s something that a machine can’t do.

Going Backward to Move Forward

The electronic has become (or maybe always has been) impersonal.

So I need to take it back to the beginning. Talk with my banker. Take an extra 30 minutes to have a face to face chat with clients about new ideas for their businesses and ours. Take 30 minutes to pick up the phone and talk with friends that run other businesses — yes, some will be with friends that in similar businesses to us, but some will be with those that are most definitely NOT in the web design/development or UX business.

As a business owner, as part of my business strategy, one of my big goals for 2010 is simply this: spend more time talking with people face to face or over the telephone instead of via email.

A few weeks ago I was feeling particularly rough about what direction life was headed between work, friends, our crazy passion for endurance events as a hobby, family, and everything else that needs to find a place in our lives. I actually felt like things might have been unraveling at the seams.

So I asked a very simple question on Twitter — are we all just burning out?

The responses people posted had one common thread: YES. Either people were feeling that they were burning out, or that they were already there, or were actually engaged in achieving multiple burnout.

Like it is normal. An expectation of our industry.

That is not acceptable.

I’m tired of seeing my friends across the globe at the wrong times. I shouldn’t be awake and neither should they! My friends on the west coast of North America? If you’re still awake and working at 3am when I’m waking up at 6 or 7 am, then something is wrong. Those in the UK and Europe? When I’m doing a bit of extra work at 9pm at night and its 3am for you? Not cool. My Kiwi and Aussie friends? Get. To. Bed.

I was honoured to speak at Webstock in Wellington, New Zealand in February this year. I was incredibly motivated by Mike Brown’s words. I’m paraphrasing, but Mike’s  opening address resonated with me:

The work we are doing on the web is critically important. We’re working at building the most important communications network in history. What we do today matters. It matters for today, for tomorrow, forever – and it deserves our very best work. We owe it to each other, to ourselves, to everyone.

Doing our best means not burning out. That should be the accepted norm in our industry.

If you’re burning out (yes, I’m talking to you) something has to give — because if it doesn’t, we won’t be producing our best work. Be conscious in your choice of what gives though — if it is family, personal health and well-being, or our relationships with friends, we’re in a lot of trouble. Those are supposed to be the most important things. It seems that they are the ones that we take for granted or sacrifice first.

Over the past few months I’ve realized that the sacrifices I have made haven’t always been the right ones — partly because I’m conflicted. I’m sure we all feel this pressure in some way: in order to provide for my family I feel more pressure for the business to do more — take on more work, expand what we’re doing, have more income so that I can provide more comfort, more food, more whatever. more. more. more. But at the end of the day, it just feels like less and less and less.

I don’t know what everyone else is feeling right now, but I know where I am. So the question is, what gives? I have no clue. But it can’t be family or me. Those are the wrong things to compromise. I owe family and me, my very best, because what I do with them, matters.

You are great at something. Speak about that. I don’t mean just “good” either — this is your chance to figure out what you do BEST. For Anton, I suggested he talk about his illustration. Anton’s digital artwork is stunning (I’ve actually hired him before to do illustration work for some of my presentations). He’d be smart to start there.

Pitch the practical. In almost all cases, a person wants to come away from a talk with things that they can use right away. For Anton, I suggested he talk about his illustration with a hands-on bent. I think the hands-on is an important piece of this when you’re starting out — a common concern for conference and event organizers is ensuring that audiences get enough of the practical techniques that they crave.

Be proactive and approach people before they approach you. This is a fact of life as a “new” speaker. Being a known speaker has a huge advantage because it is harder to get a speaking gig if you don’t have experience and if you don’t have experience… well, you know how that goes. So, go out and hunt them down.

Seek and ye shall find. Search engines are key — look up those keywords and find conferences that fit the bill. For Anton we searched for Hands-on illustrator workshops and hands-on illustrator conference and could easily expand to include the phrases how to, demonstration, speaking. The point? It isn’t that hard to find places if you know how to use Google.

Find speaker related sites. Sites like SpeakerSite or the freshly launched SpeakerRate are filled with other speakers. And where there are speakers, there are conferences and organizers. SlideShare is a great starting point as well — a quick search there will help you find people and conferences that are related to the topics you have identified that you want to speak about. Once you’ve identified those, go hunt them down.

You must choose wisely. Pick the right conferences. Looking at Anton’s logical topic choice — hands-on illustration, focused on technique — he needs to target specific types of conferences. Off the top of my head I could think of two conferences that would be a great fit: TODCon and Adobe MAX . TODCon is a smaller conference that alternates between Orlando and Las Vegas with a focus on practical how-to sessions. MAX is the pinnacle of how-to sessions for Adobe products. They aren’t all how-to/demonstrations, but a large portion is and this would be a perfect match for Anton.

Get an introduction. The next step, of course, is to get Anton an introduction to the right people at those conferences. I’ll be introducing Anton to my contacts for both TODCon and MAX so that he can get on their radar.

Tell it like it is: You have to tell people that you’re looking for speaking gigs. Much like Anton did to me :) Who should you tell? Everyone of course, but I’d focus on friends and clients as a starting point.

Certainly LinkedIn and Twitter can be part of your search as well — leave no stone unturned and I’d bet that you can come up with several opportunities within a week.

Have other suggestions? Things that worked for you? Would love to hear them in the comments!

Not only do I have the ability to view my Flickr photos through the Apple TV, but also those of my contacts. At the time, I simply thought “cool!” and went to the list of my contacts.

First up? Ben Buchanan, who I’d just had the chance to see at Web Directions South. I pushed play to view a slideshow of Ben’s photos from Web Directions South. The photoset starts playing and is set to music — I didn’t realize it would do that, but the tune seems very appropriate: Three Little Birds from Sean Paul and Ziggy Marley (“Don’t worry… ’bout a thing… ‘cos every little thing… is gonna be alright”). As the photos play, I see my friends. I see Ben. I see Chaals. Lisa and Lisa and Lachlan, John and Maxine, Scott and Cheryl. My head and heart both started racing.

Next up was Jeremy Keith. Scrolling through his sets I see dConstruct 2008 and push play. I see photos of speakers, attendees, conference organizers — and friends in each category. It starts happening again. I see Jessica, Paul Duncan, Andy Budd, James Box and more. Heart racing, fitting with the music. What is happening?

I need to see something else.

I get down to the J’s. And I find Jason Santa Maria.

I push play. It happens again. The music is perfect. Iris, from the Goo Goo Dolls.

Picture this: a Ryan Irelan flap ‘n snap comes across the screen and the lyrics play… “And I don’t want the world to see me, because I don’t think that they’d understand.” Yes, it was perfect.

And then it happens. Again. Jason Santa Maria, frozen in my TV, staring at me as I’m sitting on the couch. In all his flap ‘n snap glory, Jason sings to me: “I just want you to know who I am…”

I completely froze.

Partly because it was a great flap ‘n snap, but mostly in the realization that this experience was something completely different than any photo browsing I’d ever done before. I wasn’t in front of my computer — my usual conduit to my friends. I was in my family room.

Family room. Where I sit and watch movies with my wife and three children. Where we LIVE.

And I realize that for the past 20 minutes, I’ve been immersed in the lives of my friends, but in my home. Not at a conference at some far reaching corner of the world. I’m in my home. And my friends are there with me.

As soon as they [the user] encounter a wacko result, it reduces their confidence in the search. For some users, this makes it unlikely they’ll continue using Search as a reliable method for completing their objective, since it works unpredictably.

That pretty much sums up my first experience with Cuil, a new search player with VC funding, managed and founded by a few former Google employees that seem keen on changing the search game.

Kudos to them for braving the “search space” or whatever it is called now, exclaiming mightily:

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance.

They completely failed for me on relevance, though as I subjected them to the first test almost any blogger will perform: searching for your own name. While most of the results were relevant, what was associated with them threw me for a loop.

There are several wacko results on that page, including an image of a crying baby beside my name as an A List Apart author, indexing a URL that is a textdrive subdomain. Peculiar.

There is the book that I contributed to, with several other fine authors: Web Standards Creativity, referencing an image that shows the cover of Beginning JavaScript with DOM Scripting and Ajax by Christian Heilmann. Odd. (I mean the result, not Christian. <cheek>Or do I?</cheek>)

But this one trumps all. It is off the wacko result scale:

Now, I loves me some Rob Weychert, but why oh why is his personal avatar associated with my company? Don’t get me wrong. Rob is a very good friend. Along with his stellar beard, he’s a an air guitar genius.

But his two-handed middle-finger salute avatar, ummm, doesn’t exactly send the kind of message that I want to be associated with the company description, if you know what I mean?